Sunday, November 8, 2009

Written in 1963

"The fear of mind and the disdain for culture, so quickly evident wherever the prior claims of practicality are urged in the literature of business, are ubiquitous themes. They rest upon two pervasive American attitudes toward civilization and personal religion -- first, a widely shared contempt for the past; and second, an ethos of self-help and personal advancement in which even religious faith becomes merely an agency of practicality." -- Richard Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life